[dsdp-tm-dev] TCF feedback

[Ken Ryall <ken.ryall@xxxxxxxxx>]

Title: TCF feedback

Hi,

I’ve been reviewing all of the material I can find about the target communications framework (TCF) project. Looks like a nice job overall, but my understanding remains fuzzy in a few areas:

What if you had multiple agents running on the same host? They would need to use different ports and so perhaps would not be discoverable? And if they were not discoverable is there some way to connect to them directly?

It looks like you might have agents providing various services running on the host or target or both. Some of the services in the reference agent (symbols, expressions) seem like they are things you would do on the host while others (run control, memory, registers) you would do on the target. When debugging on the host only all those could be rolled into one agent but otherwise it seems like you would need to split them up.

I understand the reference agent is written in plain vanilla C code to facility scaling down to simple devices. But if I were writing an agent that was intended to live host side or for more robust targets I would prefer to write it in C++. Are they any issues with writing an agent in C++?

It seems like if you currently had a debug agent on a target you could convert it into a TCF agent and just revise the host side stuff that talks to it. That would open it up to other tools that support the TCF protocol. Do I have that right?

Thanks - Ken